How to Repot Tomatoes

Repotting tomatoes is a great way to take plants in one location and give them a whole new lease on life. Repot tomatoes with help from a gardening expert in this free video clip.

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Hi, I'm Angela Price from Eden Condensed Small Space Garden Design and this is Garden Space. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to re-pot a tomato plant. So I bought this tomato plant a while back and I actually forgot about it and it's, I should have put it in the ground or in a pot but now it's sort of overgrowing it's pot. And this happens every once in a while. Usually when you buy tomato seedlings in the nursery center you want to choose smaller seedlings so that they really have a good chance of getting roots into the ground or into the containers that you're putting them in. But I'm going to re-pot this one because it's already starting to grow tomatoes and we want to give it a good fighting chance to have some yummy tomatoes this season. So what I want to do is prepare the pot that I'm going to put it in and I'm just using a nursery pot. You can use these plastic pots, they're great because they don't tend to dry out as much as a terracotta pot does. And I've rinsed it out because it did have another plant in here, and cleaned it out real well. I've also put some organic potting soil and some organic compost in here too. And I'm going to make a nice deep hole in the middle and then I'm going to add some organic fertilizer, a nice handful down at the bottom of my planting hole. And then I'm going to take this out. Now sometimes when these have been in the pots too long the roots might start coming out, and it's okay to cut those roots on the bottom. This one doesn't seem so bad. And I'm going to ease it out but you can see how root bound this one is. It's really important that we loosen up the roots and if some of the dirt falls off that's okay. And then I want to plant this as deep as possible in here and cover up the bottom part of the plant so that way it gets in there nice and deep. But the last thing I want to do is to trim off some of the dead items here. There were some flowers here that didn't really work and so I'm going to take those off. And I'm also going to take off these little tomatoes here because right now they really haven't had enough nutrients to do well and I'd rather put the nutrients and the energy of the plant into the new growth. So I'm going to take off some of this old growth here, and pinch that off. And lastly I'm going to give it a nice good watering. Probably every two weeks I'm going to add another, maybe 1/4 cup of fertilizer around the base of the plant to continue to give it good nutrients, and also make sure that it's kept evenly moist and in full sun for at least six to eight hours a day. If you have any other questions about how to re-pot a tomato plant please contact me at www.edencondensed.com. Thank you very much.